


Never Again

by samariumwriting



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Communication, Established Relationship, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-Blue Lions Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:55:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21721834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samariumwriting/pseuds/samariumwriting
Summary: Everything is over, and everything is going the way Felix never could have imagined it would - and not in a bad way. The only problem is that maybe he's not quite enough once all the fighting is said and done.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 2
Kudos: 80
Collections: FE3H Holiday Gift Exchange





	Never Again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [birdsuit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdsuit/gifts).



> This is my gift exchange piece for birdsuit!! It was a delight to write this and the prompts were all SO GOOD so I had a blast. Also a big thank you to Ostodvani for beta reading this and making sure it made sense (ur the best Emil).

Felix knew that something was wrong, because he wasn’t exactly going to miss it, was he? How could he miss it, when he spent all day and all night at Dimitri’s side? Dimitri was in his bed when he woke up, they ate all their meals together, often spent time in the same meetings talking to the same people about the same difficulties, and when they finally managed to get a break they went to bed side by side.

Basically, when things started to go wrong, Felix could see it. He knew Dimitri. He knew Dimitri better than he knew the calluses on his own hands. He could see the faraway look in Dimitri’s eyes. He could see him jumping at shadows that were barely even there. He could see it all.

The problem here was that he couldn’t do a damn thing. He couldn’t stop Dimitri from staring into his soup at dinner. When he spoke Dimitri’s name, there was no magical flash of recognition. His touch couldn’t heal (or maybe he didn’t know the right places), his words couldn’t soothe (or maybe he just didn’t know the right words).

Felix could see it; he couldn’t do a thing. And it made him feel utterly useless.

It was after a bad night. The worst in a while. Felix had barely been conscious at first, barely stirring from his sleep when he heard something in the room. That in itself wasn’t unusual; Dimitri tended to be quite a restless sleeper and Felix often found himself in a completely different spot in the bed in relation to Dimitri in the morning. What was unusual was the mumbling.

Mumbling, which turned to something akin to a fervent, repeated phrase. Then Dimitri’s voice increased in volume, more and more, until he was tossing and turning and how was he even asleep still? Felix couldn’t understand.

“Dimitri.” He kept his voice low, but even. “Dimitri, you’re dreaming.”

Dimitri continued to squirm, his body convulsing, his hands pulled up over his ears as he apologised, over and over, to that list of names Felix was intimately familiar with. “Dimitri.”

They’d never talked about what Felix should do in this situation. They’d tried to ignore that something like this would even happen at all. He didn’t know what to do, and he felt paralyzed, but he couldn’t- he couldn’t ignore this. He couldn’t just lie here, not getting through to him. Slowly, gently, Felix moved his left hand to rest on Dimitri’s leg.

Felix was not someone who tended to be slow to react. But with his mind still fogged by sleep and his defenses down, he wasn’t expecting the elbow to his ribs, the hands reaching blindly in the darkness, and the heavy thud as he hit the floor.

There was an instant of silence while Felix got his bearings. His head hurt. His chest hurt. His ears were ringing, and the light in the room was low. He could barely see Dimitri’s form, hunched over, still in bed. He only realised Dimitri had even been looking at him when he turned away and his blue eye caught the little remaining light.

“Get away,” he said. His voice was low. Dangerous. Dark in a way Felix hadn’t heard for months.

“Dimitri-”

“Stay back.” It was a warning. Dimitri was warning him. If Felix got closer again...who knew what he would do? Who knew how badly he could get hurt?

“No,” he said, trying desperately to keep his voice as even as he could. He couldn’t let Dimitri see the rushing in his blood that he felt. He knew next to nothing about what Dimitri was really like when something like this happened. “Get a hold of yourself.”

“You don’t belong here, you shouldn’t be here,” Dimitri said, and Felix’s stomach plummeted. His mind was screaming at him not to listen to Dimitri when he was in this state, but...the words hit him harder than any jab to the ribs.

“Dimitri, I sleep in this bed every night,” he said. He didn’t even know if Dimitri was listening to him. If he wasn’t, Felix didn’t think there was anything else he could do.

“This is my only- I just- stay away, Glenn! This isn’t your place, this is-”

Dimitri continued speaking, but Felix didn’t hear any more. He rushed out of the room, his ears still ringing, his heart pounding, and his mind twisting in circles.

He went to the bedroom he used before he permanently moved into Dimitri’s, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in his ribs. He got into bed practically in a daze. He wasn’t sure if he’d quite managed to wake up before everything had happened, and nothing felt quite real. Nothing except the words that still echoed in his ears. ‘Stay away, Glenn.’ It took far longer than he’d hoped to get back to sleep.

When he awoke in the morning, he was cold in a way he hadn’t been for weeks, and the room felt empty. Cold. He felt empty and cold, and his head ached very slightly (dimly, he was aware that he shouldn’t have gone to sleep straight after hitting his head on the floor, but everything felt very far away right then). When he moved and his ribs complained, his heart sank. And when he remembered Dimitri’s words, everything ached. Dimitri didn’t speak to him at breakfast, and Felix watched as his cutlery bent slowly out of shape over the course of the meal.

It didn’t improve. When Dimitri found out that he’d broken Felix’s ribs, regardless of the fact that he clearly hadn’t been himself when it happened, he had barely stopped apologising. Every time Felix even tried to start a conversation with Dimitri, he found himself on the receiving end of yet another apology. And when he followed Dimitri to their chambers (their chambers. Not Dimitri’s, because Felix had lived there alongside him for months), just as he always did, every single night, Dimitri told him not to sleep with him that night.

Felix, unable to summon up the- he didn’t even know. He didn’t know what he needed to solve this, which quality he was missing that meant he wasn’t enough. All he knew was that Dimitri would not let him get close again, and Felix couldn’t quite start the conversation they desperately needed to have. A conversation about helping and healing and Glenn. Mostly about Glenn.

So they stayed apart. For a few days, a week, two weeks. Felix’s room was lonely without Dimitri, his sleep restless. He woke up just as exhausted as he was when he went to sleep, and Dimitri looked no better. Dimitri looked like death warmed up. Felix felt like Dimitri looked.

Two weeks was his limit. Two weeks in, when it stopped feeling strange to wake up alone even if it was still desperately wrong, Felix knew this had to end. He didn’t think he could stand losing Dimitri again. He couldn’t let him slip away, for fear that this time was his last chance.

The only problem was getting Dimitri to let him in again. Because if there was anything Felix did know about Dimitri, in spite of his inability to get through to him, it was that Dimitri was absolutely fantastic at wallowing in feelings and not letting anyone in. He was an expert at it, in fact.

Which was why, now Felix had reached his limit with staying away from Dimitri, he was sat with his back on the inside of the bedroom door. “You’re...not moving,” Dimitri said. He looked distinctly distressed. That was half of the plan (the full plan was for him to feel better by the end of the night. If that involved distressing him until he relented then Felix would have to live with that).

“I’m not moving,” he repeated, “until we talk about two weeks ago.”

Dimitri let out a heavy sigh. “I have apologised profusely, Felix, and I really am dreadfully sorry for what happened. How are your ribs healing?”

“That’s not what I want to talk about, moron,” he said. Dimitri, to his credit, was very much used to Felix being very rude to him, and he didn’t so much as flinch. Felix had said much worse to him in the past, after all. “My ribs are fine. I didn’t even get a concussion from the fall. We need to talk about everything else.”

“Another time?” Dimitri suggested. His expression was pleading. Felix ignored it. He would not let himself be pushed away. He’d seen Dimitri do this enough times to know he shouldn’t buy it. “I know you feel strongly about this, Felix, but I do not want to hurt you again.”

‘Then tell me how to help, damn it,’ he wanted to say, but he didn’t say that. He didn’t know why. Saying it would probably help. Saying it might get him the answer he wanted. But it required speaking far more truths than he was willing to reveal. It was too early in the night to bare his soul to Dimitri. He was too afraid he would still be shut out. “What did you see that made it happen?”

Felix hadn’t quite realised how much Dimitri had been fidgeting until he stopped dead at those words. He looked tired. After a moment, he pulled a cushion from his chair and placed it behind his back, leaning against the bed. He was most of the way across the room, but he felt so close anyway. “They are not real,” he said. “I know that.”

“Well, that’s a start,” he said. He thought back to the Dimitri who spoke to ghosts more often than real people. That Dimitri hadn’t seemed so far removed from the one who called apologies to a man who had been dead for a decade instead of seeing the real person right in front of him.

“It was a moment of weakness,” he continued. “I do not want- no. I was afraid of the ghosts that now usually lie quietly in their graves returning to me. When I felt your touch, I was convinced-”

“Convinced that the dead had somehow crawled out of the grave to reach you?” Felix asked. Glenn had been dead for ten years and Dimitri still feared the prospect of his touch. “And what about after?”

Dimitri’s eye fell to his lap. Felix suddenly felt so far away from him, but he couldn’t move any closer. Not yet. There was a distance that needed to be closed that could not be closed by contact; he’d found that out the hard way. “...I don’t remember,” he admitted. “I was- not myself. I could not tell you what came after you fell to the floor.”

Felix remained silent for a moment. If Dimitri was beating himself up over something so small, something so minor in comparison to the hurt that had coursed through him due to his words, maybe telling him wasn’t his best option. “You told me to get away,” he said. “But you weren’t calling to me. You were calling to-”

“Oh, Felix,” Dimitri said, and the weight to his words filled Felix with...something. Something he couldn’t describe. It hurt to feel. “I am truly, sincerely sorry. I know that you- you are distinct in my mind, I swear that to you.”

“So why?” he asked. He tried not to sound too heartbroken. He tried not to sound too much like this mattered to him, but it did. It did, and he couldn’t hide it for the life of him.

Dimitri heaved a sigh, and stood up again. He moved to the heavy curtains, pulling them aside and opening the door out to the balcony. “I feel this would be easier with some air,” he said. “Would you join me?”

“Fine,” he said. It was better than being pushed away. He stood at Dimitri’s side and stared out into the gardens below. At least he didn’t have to watch him like this. He could look anywhere but into Dimitri’s eye that saw far, far too much of him.

“I know that they’re not real,” Dimitri explained again. “I can tell, now. There’s no need for ghosts when the living surround me every day. And yet- there is something in my mind that still forms them, in the depths of night when everything is supposed to lie silent and still. The sound of their screaming crowds me, and the sights before me twist beyond recognition.

“I wanted my life to be free of them.” Dimitri had inched a little closer. Close enough to put his arm around Felix, if he wanted to. Felix hoped he wouldn’t, if only for now. He wasn’t ready for that. “So when I warned you away...perhaps I was seeing you, and feared what I could do to you. Perhaps I saw Glenn, and wished he would leave me alone.”

“So you do equate us,” he said. There was no point mincing words. No use to pretending anything else. It was the truth, and they needed to get it out of the way before this could go any further. Could they go any further, with Felix aware that Dimitri still saw him as a dead man?

“I do not,” Dimitri said firmly. “In that darkness, you could have been anyone. You could have been my father, my...stepmother. My mind then is not my own, and you are never Glenn to me when I am fully myself. That night, I saw Glenn in the space I share with someone who is emphatically not him, and I did not want his ghost to enter that space. I am...truly sorry I hurt you.”

Felix wanted to tell him it was okay, but it wasn’t. He wanted to tell him that it hadn’t hurt him at all, but that would be a lie. “It’s in the past,” he said, because that was the only thing he could really settle on.

“It could happen again,” Dimitri protested. He sounded afraid. Felix supposed it was good that he cared, but he cared far too much. He was paralysed by that fear. “I can’t- I can’t stop it from happening.”

Internally, Felix berated himself again. He was meant to know Dimitri better than anyone alive. He was meant to know Dimitri better than he knew himself. He was meant to be able to shield Dimitri from harm, and yet here he was, unable to do a thing. “Can I?” he asked. He sounded far more sad than he’d wanted to.

Dimitri’s right hand, flat against the balcony’s edge, brushed Felix’s left. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice low. Soft. “I don’t know.”

Felix didn’t know what to suggest. Why did things have to come to this? Why couldn’t everything just turn out okay in the end? “And what are you going to do about that?” he asked. “Deny yourself any semblance of happiness? Accept that for the rest of your life you can’t get close to anyone?”

Dimitri moved to pull his hand away, but Felix gripped it tightly. “Don’t answer that question with yes,” he snapped. “I am right here. Don’t tell me that after all this, you’re just going to push me away again.”

Dimitri’s breath caught, and for a moment Felix worried that he’d said something horribly wrong. “You would be safer away from me,” he said. “There’s no telling when this could happen again.”

“Is that really meant to change anything at all?” he asked. “I’ve seen you at your worst, but I didn’t leave. If you think it’s pointless for me to try, why did you even let me get close to you at all?”

“Felix, I-”

“You’re so wrapped up in what you think I should think that you haven’t considered how I really feel,” he said. He gripped Dimitri’s hand even tighter. “I’m right here. I’m asking you to help me help you. Do not push me away.”

Dimitri let out a deep breath, and turned his hand in Felix’s so they linked more naturally. “Of course,” he said. “I will- do what I can. I’m sorry.”

Felix squeezed his hand, pulling him closer. He felt like he’d just stepped over the edge of the balcony, the way his heart was racing. He felt like he was falling, somehow, yet he was stood stock still. Dimitri leaned in, and this time Felix felt he could meet him in the middle.

That night, they spent hours sat awake in bed, pouring out everything that needed to be said. Every fear, every insecurity. Every possible route for improvement, any action to avoid. They shared things far more than kisses and quiet words. By the time dawn streaked through the window, Felix was exhausted, but he felt lighter than he had in years.

This time, he would be enough. This time, he would understand. He would not lose Dimitri ever again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! :) I hope you enjoyed. Please leave a comment if you feel like it, and you can find me on Twitter @samariumwriting!


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